Rental property portfolio tracker: every property, its return and its papers

The short answer

• Use a spreadsheet if you own one or two properties, you enjoy maintaining it and nobody else needs to read it.
• Use a landlord tool (bank feeds, rent collection, tax reports) if your pain is the monthly bookkeeping. Stessa is one of the best-known, and it has a free plan; see our Stessa vs Owned Map comparison.^[1]
• Use Owned Map if your pain is the bigger picture: you want every property, and anything else you own, on one map with its return, loan, share and papers, and you do not want to connect a bank account.

Most landlords end up with a bookkeeping tool and a place to see the whole portfolio. They are different jobs.

What a tracker should answer

A tracker is only worth having if it answers questions you actually ask. For a landlord, these are the six that matter.

1. Which property earns the most, and which the least? On the same measure, so they can be ranked.
2. How much equity do I have, and where is it? Equity is what a property is worth minus what you owe on it, and it is the money you could actually take out.
3. Is it paying for itself? Cash flow after the loan, not just the rent.
4. What would I keep if I sold? After selling costs, tax and the loan, which is far less than the price.
5. Who owns what? If you hold a property with someone, your share is the number that counts.
6. What is due, and where is the paper? The insurance renewal, the tax bill, the lease, the loan agreement.

If your current setup answers all six in a minute, you do not need a new tool. If it takes an evening, read on.

The numbers, defined

Every number below is calculated from a handful of figures you enter for each property: value, purchase cost, yearly rent, yearly expenses, loan balance, loan payment and your ownership share.

• Net operating income (NOI) = yearly rent − yearly expenses. It leaves out the loan, so properties can be compared whatever their financing.
• Gross yield = rent ÷ value. A rough first look, before costs.
• NOI yield on value (the capitalization rate) = NOI ÷ current value. It uses today’s value, not the price you paid, which is the point: it tells you what the property earns on what it is worth now.^[2] Owned Map calls it “NOI yield” or “net yield”.
• Yield on cost = NOI ÷ purchase cost. It tells you how hard the money you put in is working.
• Cash flow = NOI − loan payments for the year. This is what reaches you.
• Equity = value − loan balance. Loan-to-value (LTV) = loan balance ÷ value.
• Payback = purchase cost ÷ NOI, in years. A blunt but useful way to compare.
• Appreciation = (value − cost) ÷ cost.

Two of these deserve a warning. NOI deliberately leaves out the loan payment. And it is not taxable profit: US tax rules treat mortgage principal differently, and the IRS says plainly that you cannot simply deduct mortgage principal payments.^[3] Cash flow, property performance and taxable profit are three different numbers. A tracker should keep the first two straight, and your accountant owns the third.

A worked example: four properties

Here is a small portfolio, with the inputs for each property and what Owned Map calculates from them.

The house is owned 40% with a partner, so the figures above are for the whole property and your share is 40%. Now the results:

The land earns nothing and costs $1,900 a year in taxes, which is 2.2% of its value, and it has gained 41.7% since you bought it.

The whole portfolio, on your share

Value of your share: $540,000 + $265,000 + $160,000 + $85,000 = $1,050,000. Debt on your share: $290,000 + $175,000 + $80,000 = $545,000. Equity: $505,000. Cash flow from the three rentals: $8,640 − $2,600 + $3,320 = $9,360 a year, $780 a month.

Reading the example

Look at what the numbers say that the rent alone did not.

The condo is the weak property. It collects $21,000 a year in rent, which sounds fine, but after expenses it earns a 4.2% NOI yield, its payback is 21.4 years, and after the loan it costs you $2,600 a year. With a 66.0% loan-to-value, it has the least cushion too. The duplex and the house, both near 6%, are doing the work.

A sale simulation shows what you would keep. Suppose you sell the condo at $265,000, with 5% selling costs and a 20% tax on the gain (both are numbers you set, not facts). The costs are $13,250. The gain is $265,000 − $13,250 − $240,000 = $11,750, so the tax is $2,350. After repaying the $175,000 loan you keep $74,400, against $90,000 of equity on paper. The $15,600 difference is the cost of selling. That is the number to compare with what the condo costs you to keep.

The portfolio is concentrated. The duplex is $540,000 of your $1,050,000, which is 51.4% of the value in one property. If you set a concentration limit, that is the kind of thing it flags.

None of this tells you what to do. It tells you where to look, which is half the battle, and it takes a minute instead of an evening.

Where the values come from

Everything above depends on the value you enter, and a rental tracker is only as good as that number.

Owned Map uses the value you enter, and keeps a history each time you update it. That can be an appraisal, a broker’s opinion, a recent comparable sale or your own judgment. You can also tell it how fast you expect a value to move each year, and it projects from there using your loan payments.

The alternative is an automated estimate. Automated home values are convenient, but they are estimates: Zillow publishes a median error for its Zestimate of roughly 7% for homes that are not on the market, and wider in some metros.^[4] On the $540,000 duplex, 7% is about $38,000 either way, and an automated estimate cannot know that a building is a duplex with two tenants, or what state its roof is in. A number you chose and dated is usually better than a placeholder, as long as you keep it fresh. A reasonable routine is to review values once a quarter and when something changes: a renovation, a nearby sale, a new valuation for insurance.

Partners and shared ownership

Plenty of rental properties are not owned 100% by one person: a partner, a sibling, a spouse, a small group. A tracker that only knows whole properties will overstate what you own and what you earn.

In Owned Map you enter the figures for the whole property and set your share once. Everything it shows and adds up is on your share, so the 40% house above counts as $160,000 of value and $80,000 of debt, not $400,000 and $200,000. If you want to see how a shared property performs for the group, the whole-property figures are the ones you entered. You can also record who the owner is.

It does not keep a ledger of who contributed what to the down payment or the roof. If your partners need that, a spreadsheet or a co-ownership tool will do it better.

Documents and dates

A portfolio also generates paper: a deed, a title, a lease, an insurance policy that renews, a loan agreement, a property tax bill. The expensive surprises usually come from a date nobody wrote down.

Owned Map keeps documents on the property they belong to and holds the dates (insurance, tax, inspections) with reminders, so the policy and its renewal sit next to the property. It also reads a deed, an invoice or a contract you upload and fills in the details for you to review before anything is saved. Check what it reads; it is a help, not an oracle.

The IRS tells rental owners to separate the costs of repairs and improvements and to keep accurate records, because you need the cost of improvements when you sell or depreciate a property.^[3] A document attached to the property it concerns makes that easier at tax time and at sale time.

If something happens to you

A landlord with several properties, a partner and a few loans leaves a complicated picture. In Caring.com’s 2025 survey of more than 2,500 US adults, only 24% said they have a will, down from 33% in 2022.^[5] A will is not an inventory, and whoever settles an estate cannot deal with a property nobody knows exists, or a loan nobody knows about.

The discipline that helps is the same one insurers recommend for household goods: the Nebraska Department of Insurance advises recording brand, price, purchase date, model, serial number and receipts, with photos.^[6] For property the equivalent is the deed reference, the loan number and the insurer. Owned Map lets you share a read-only link, give household members access, and set a private emergency sheet for one trusted person, so someone can find out what exists, where it is and where the papers are.

Tracking is not bookkeeping

It is worth being clear about the difference, because many landlord tools blur it.

Bookkeeping records every transaction as it happens: each rent payment, each repair bill, each fee. Its output is a ledger and the reports your accountant needs. A tool such as Stessa does this from your bank feeds.^[1]

Tracking works at the level of the property and the year: what it is worth, what it earns in a year, what you owe, what you would keep. Its output is a decision. Owned Map tracks. You enter each property’s yearly rent and expenses, which is enough for yield and cash flow, and you can copy them from your bookkeeping reports once a year.

Tax is a third thing again. In the United States, residential rental property is depreciated over 27.5 years under the general depreciation system, according to IRS Publication 527.^[3] Depreciation is a tax calculation, and it is not in any of the numbers above. Ask your accountant how it applies to you.

What Owned Map does not do

So that nobody buys the wrong thing, here is the list.

• It does not connect to your bank, so there are no automatic transactions and no bank logins to protect.
• It does not collect rent, screen tenants, send leases for signature or manage maintenance requests.
• It does not produce tax forms or a ledger.
• It does not fetch market values or rent estimates for you.
• It does not keep a contribution ledger between co-owners.

If those are what you need, use a landlord tool for them. If you want the picture of the whole portfolio, add Owned Map.

Set it up in an afternoon

1. List your properties. Download the free inventory template, which uses the exact columns the app imports, and fill in one row per property: name, address, value, cost, rent, expenses, loan, payment and share. Import the CSV and every property lands on the map.
2. Check each one. Open each property, confirm the figures, and set its status (occupied, vacant, leased or held).
3. Attach the papers. Upload the deed, the policy and the loan agreement to each property.
4. Set the dates. Add a reminder for each insurance renewal, tax bill and inspection.
5. Look at the ranking. Sort by net yield and read the weak end first.

For four properties, that is a short afternoon. After that, the upkeep is a few minutes a quarter.

Price and who it is for

Owned Map’s pricing is public. $47 a month includes 3 assets. $15 each for assets 4 to 10, $10 each for assets 11 to 25 and $5 each from the 26th, up to 100 assets. Paying yearly is 30% less. There is a 7-day free trial, and a card is required.

Here is the honest version. If you own one or two rentals and keep a tidy spreadsheet, you do not need this. It starts to pay off when you have three or more properties, when you share ownership, when you also own things that are not rentals (land, a vehicle, a boat), or when someone else needs to be able to find everything. If all you want is the books done, a landlord tool with a free plan is the cheaper answer. If your question is which assets to keep, you are in the right place. You can see the fuller picture of how it compares with the tools that connect to your accounts in our Kubera vs Owned Map comparison, and if you mainly care about privacy, read about a net worth tracker without linking bank accounts.

How we checked

We wrote this page on November 5, 2026. The product facts are what Owned Map does today. The formulas are standard. Outside claims, such as the capitalization rate, the IRS rules and what Stessa offers, are numbered and listed under Sources. The sale example uses a 5% selling cost and a 20% tax rate that we chose for illustration; yours will differ. This page is general information, not tax, legal or financial advice.

Sources

1. Stessa: homepage, Stessa. Automated bookkeeping, a bank account per property, income statement, net cash flow and tenant ledger reports, tax package reports and online rent collection. Read November 3, 2026.
2. Capitalization rate, Wikipedia. The cap rate is net operating income divided by current value, not the original price. Read November 3, 2026.
3. Publication 527, Residential Rental Property (2025), Internal Revenue Service. You cannot simply deduct mortgage principal payments; separate the costs of repairs and improvements and keep accurate records; residential rental property is depreciated over 27.5 years under GDS. Read November 3, 2026.
4. What is a Zestimate?, Zillow. Zillow publishes the Zestimate’s median error: roughly 7% for off-market homes, and wider in some metros. Figures as summarized in search results for Zillow’s pages; open the page for the current table.
5. Wills Survey 2025, Caring.com, with YouGov. 24% of respondents have a will, down from 33% in 2022 (more than 2,500 US adults). Read November 3, 2026.
6. Before the Storm: Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late, Nebraska Department of Insurance. An inventory should record brand, price, purchase date, model, serial number and receipts, with photos. Read November 3, 2026.